Co-occurring child maltreatment and domestic violence: the judicial imperative to ensure reasonable efforts.

• Author: O'Riley, Christine A.
• Position: Florida law

When he is beating me, I try not to scream because I do not want my children to hear my cries." In the world of impoverishment and deprivation where so many parties in the dependency court system live, violence is commonplace. Violence in the home, violence in the community, and violence in the school are quotidian events in the lives of the children who constitute our court population.

Five years ago from the dependency bench in Miami-Dade County, the Dependency Court Intervention Program for Family Violence (DCIPFV) was created when it became evident that child welfare professionals had little understanding of the dynamics of domestic violence and the impact exposure to violence had on children. The DCIPFV is a national demonstration project funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, Violence Against Women Grants Office. The program, which is still ongoing, is the first to attempt to examine domestic violence within the context of child maltreatment in a court setting.

A key component of DCIPFV is advocates, specially trained in the areas of domestic violence and child protection, who approach mothers either through the Department of Children and Families child protective investigators during the child maltreatment investigation or directly through the dependency court to inquire about their safety and offer confidential services. Advocates, who have privileged communication through Florida statute, help battered women steer through the complicated child welfare and court systems, and assist with other needs, such as protective orders and community resources. (1) The protection of confidentiality is an integral component of the program. When a battered mother works with a DCIPFV court advocate, neither the court nor the child protection system knows whether she is a victim of domestic violence unless she shares the information herself or asks her advocate to do so. (2) DCIPFV advocates are vital to battered mothers; helping them address the violence in their lives makes them more apt to raise their children in safety. (3)

Allegations of domestic violence were rarely seen in court detention petitions when children were taken from their homes. (4) In cases of obvious domestic violence and child maltreatment, the initial response of the child welfare system was removal of the child from the home and the arms, often, of a battered mother. In many situations, the mother was doing her best to protect her children from the violence in the home.

The "failure to protect a child from inflicted injury" by the battered mother or "family violence threatens child" are child maltreatment allegations that frequently result in the placement of children in substitute care. (5) Thus, children are subjected to the frequent trauma of observing domestic violence between their care givers and then removed from their violent homes and their mothers. Sometimes removal is necessary to protect the child; often it is not the most effective way to make a child safe. In failure-to-protect cases the onus to control and predict the abuse is placed on the victim, the battered woman, rather than the perpetrator, the batterer. (6) The creators of DCIPFV hypothesized that the most constructive way to make a child safe may be to work with the child's mother and give her the support and resources she needs to leave a violent relationship.

Too often, without intervention, family violence results in child homicide. Each year in Florida, more than 80 children die at the hands of their caretakers...